04-14-2023, 03:24 PM
The thing (for she is a thing) staggers, graceless. The patchwork knees, cobbled together by magic, bleed where she has sunk to them on the stones. (How strange that she should bleed, both where the skin tears and from those strange, unblinking eyes, when there is no heartbeat. No pulse. How cruel that magician’s design, how sadistic. The blood springs, not from veins, but from other, deeper well. It never stops.)
She travels, not because she wants to but because there is nothing else at all to do. She travels and she calls upon the dead and she sinks herself into the Underworld, flaying the souls there. And she delights in it for the reaper had created her to be this thing of death.
But she wanders aimless here now, oblivious to the horrified looks of those she passes on her way to no place in particular. She wanders, bleeding, and passes through the place where the creator had lived, where the Fates had been designed, conceived. (The Fates after which she had been fashioned. The reaper had taken the black, the gray, the pure white, tethered the pieces together with magic. Animated the thing and let it loose on the world. It is not beautiful, this thing, not as the Fates are beautiful.)
She does not recognize borders, does not know that places have changed, does not know that she has made it to a place that itself has risen from the dead. (Would she find it delightful? Would she know what it meant?)
She wanders and finds him quite by accident.
“You,” she rasps, the voice garbled, all wrong. She says it as if she knows him.
And perhaps she does. Perhaps she had seen him in the Underworld, perhaps she can smell it on him.
She stops there, goes so impossibly still, bleeding from the knees and the eyes, the blood pooling at her feet. She stares at him, unmoving, unblinking. But she says nothing further.
She travels, not because she wants to but because there is nothing else at all to do. She travels and she calls upon the dead and she sinks herself into the Underworld, flaying the souls there. And she delights in it for the reaper had created her to be this thing of death.
But she wanders aimless here now, oblivious to the horrified looks of those she passes on her way to no place in particular. She wanders, bleeding, and passes through the place where the creator had lived, where the Fates had been designed, conceived. (The Fates after which she had been fashioned. The reaper had taken the black, the gray, the pure white, tethered the pieces together with magic. Animated the thing and let it loose on the world. It is not beautiful, this thing, not as the Fates are beautiful.)
She does not recognize borders, does not know that places have changed, does not know that she has made it to a place that itself has risen from the dead. (Would she find it delightful? Would she know what it meant?)
She wanders and finds him quite by accident.
“You,” she rasps, the voice garbled, all wrong. She says it as if she knows him.
And perhaps she does. Perhaps she had seen him in the Underworld, perhaps she can smell it on him.
She stops there, goes so impossibly still, bleeding from the knees and the eyes, the blood pooling at her feet. She stares at him, unmoving, unblinking. But she says nothing further.
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Set